Friday 14 February

Delhi

My cold is hanging around and very annoying, so I’m still not feeling well. The coughing has subsided somewhat, thankfully. When I woke, Matthew gave me a hand-drawn Valentine’s Day card – he’s been carrying it with him since we left home. What a sweetheart. 

Breakfast at the Ambassador ‘Yellow Brick Road’ restaurant is a little disappointing compared to some of the other hotels we’ve stayed at – but they had muesli and fruit. Coffee was good. They had lots of red balloons up for Valentine’s Day.

Matthew booked us to visit the gardens of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (president’s residence, formerly the viceroy’s house) which was designed by Edward Lutyens. The Rashtrapati Bhavan has 355 rooms and was largely completed by 1931. Getting in turned into a bit of a saga – we were misdirected three times and then had to get a tuk tuk to the rear entrance for the right way in.

The gardens were beautiful and there were lots of school children visiting – they made for a really nice atmosphere, but meant that it was very crowded.

Afterwards we took another tuk tuk to India Gate – a massive war memorial to the over 74,000 soldiers of the Indian army who died between 1914 and 1921 fighting with the British. Also designed by Lutyens, the foundation stone of what was then called the All India War Memorial, was laid on 10 February 1921 (Lutyens designed the cenotaph in Whitehall, London, too). 

Nearby there’s a statue of Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in a tall columned cupola – the cupola was was originally built in 1936 and a statue of British king George V was installed.

The statue was vandalised in 1943 by Indian independence activists then removed in 1968 (to Coronation Park in Delhi where apparently loads of British Raj-era statues have been taken) leaving the cupola empty for many years.

There were continued debates about what the do about the empty space – a statue of Ghandi was suggested, but the current Indian prime minister installed the statue of Subhas Chandra Bose,  in 2022 – a somewhat controversial decision since although he fought for independence he collaborated with Nazis and fascist Japan in the 1940s.

We wandered along the Kartavya Path past enormous canals and fountains towards the new very heavily fortified new India parliament building, opened in 2023.

We past the massive blocks still under construction of three ‘common central secretariat’ buildings where all ministerial departments will be housed and took a metro train to Rajiv Chowk to have lunch in Third Wave, Connaught Circle – a really nice trendy place with some nice vegan options – especially the lovely bananas and chocolate loaf – yum!

I needed a rest after that – so back to our hotel and another trip to Khan Market for light dinner at Bloom Cafe. We found a nice grocery store at Khan Market – with vegan chocolate and biscuits … then an iced cream store with vegan sorbet (dark chocolate for Matthew , blueberry for me) – all a nice Valentine’s Day treat!